


Footnote [Not for Publication in The Strand]

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Established Relationship, Foot Fetish, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:44:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3138110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes has a particular "nervous arrangement" all his own and, as a result and inter alia, very sensitive feet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footnote [Not for Publication in The Strand]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaraal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaraal/gifts).



It was an iron-hard, bone-dry February. The London sky that might otherwise have been clear, crystalline blue shading to purple and indigo as night fell was draped instead in a veil of smoke. Half a million coal fires were coughing out their lives above the rooftops and four million souls huddled around hearths that might be expansively gracious, bravely keeping up appearances or simply squalid, so long only as they were warm.

221b Baker Street rarely reached a state of grace but by this time in his career Holmes had means enough to have no need to eke out the coals: not that he gave a jot for appearances. Otherwise, he might not have been stretched out as he was on our sofa before the fire, in place of our accustomed chairs, still half-dressed, when anyone might have come in.

We had been running down a hundred alleyways south of the river all afternoon, pursuing a gang of Rotherhithe coiners. By the time they were twisting and swearing in official hands, I was not the only one limping. A cab ride home eased me, but Holmes continued to frown and fuss under his breath even after we arrived at our rooms. 

“Let’s have a look, then.” I offered him his chair and a gesture toward the leg which he had been favouring all the way up the stairs.

“It’s nothing, Watson. Must you mother me incessantly?”

I let my face reprove him in place of strong words. Words bounced off him as raindrops on a pavement when he was like this – wanting aid but too proud to ask except with a barb on the hook. I have often used the sitting room as a makeshift surgery. Mrs Hudson, with that unfailing instinct for our needs which made her the queen of landladies, had already had the little maid Betty build and light a fire ready for our return and hang our dressing gowns on an airer before it.

Clad in stout, tartan plush whilst Holmes reclined, fidgeting, in fraying sleeves of mouse-coloured felt, I knelt by his feet and unlaced his boots until they were so loose they all but fell into my hands. His woollen stockings were a challenge, more so as he made no move to help me but only lay back with one arm hitched over the sofa back and the other hand stuffed firmly in his pocket, an expression on his face of distracted affection, mixed with his usual habit of continual scrutiny – a pretence of detachment over a core of exact dissection.

I wanted to make some joke about being a doctor - and an officer - not a batman, but as I tugged the stocking over the high arch of his left foot he hissed and bared his teeth. I rotated the ankle joint with care. Nothing amiss there. Likewise no bruising at the toes, no crushing. The sole, however, proved tender to the touch and unyielding of movement. Rigging up a cold compress was the work of a moment and I found I had not altogether lost my dressing skills as I wound the linen bandage gently snug.

“Spot of plantarfascial strain. The only cure is rest. Best lie up here for a bit, old man. I’ll ring for tea.”

“Brandy.”

He was oddly pale for a man who had survived far worse with only a snarl and a shrug. The way he put away a glassful of French cognac surprised me too. I started to doubt my diagnosis.

“Nothing broken, doctor, never fear. It is only that your hero has, as it were, feet of clay.”

I chuckled. “You tell me this as if it were news, Holmes. I have lived with you, on and off, for years.”

“Very droll. I mean that I can bear any injury save to my feet. Put it down to the same quirk of nervous arrangement that gave me perfect pitch, or the ability to spot a false banknote at sight.”

“Or to dispense with the softer passions, lest they bias your judgement.”

He always smiled when I gave him back his own words like this, when I presented him to himself as I do in the stories, those paragons of misdirection. It is true, I have had no declarations on bended knee, no love letters and, even if the law were other than it is, I should not expect to be greeted at our front door with a kiss. Devotion crept up on us unawares, inverted attraction persuading us against our will and we are, when all is said and done, English gentlemen for whom enough is quite as good as a feast.

Yet I knew the meaning of his glance, of the beckoning hand bringing me to his side. I knew he wanted those soft passions, wanted his judgement to be overturned – for who would dare, in this England of ours, to act as he did if his judgement were sound?

 

I settled myself for an evening in the company of him I loved best. Idle talk, he called it, with a gleam in his eye. The exchange of confidences – _I never thought in two score of years to find this **Nor I, my heart, in a lifetime**_ – of caresses _his skin so fine where the sun never scorched it, his neck so straight and strong_ – of utter trust.

I reached for his hand, still out of sight, but he would not give it me.

“No, Watson. John. I want…Pain and pleasure run along the same courses. ‘Nervous arrangements’ have it so, do they not?”

It did not take a man very much quicker on the uptake than the Watson of the stories to understand him. And it did not take me, the lover of Sherlock Holmes in all his infinite variety, any time at all. He might be lame in one foot, but nature gave him two, and me two hands… and a mouth.

With infinite care, I sat at one end of the sofa and he put both feet in my lap. If anyone had happened upon us, all but fully clothed and sitting thus, I was only a doctor with his patient. I did not lock the door, as I did even in the middle of the night when he crept up to my room or I down to his. No-one who discovered us could have mistaken what we were up to then. 

A cloth and lukewarm water in a tin bowl, the remains of my hasty doctoring, still sat on the hearthrug and I began with a thorough cleansing of his sound foot. Each toe; the rough pad of his heel; the smooth and soaring architecture of his sole; the sinews over the arch that flexed and stood proud as any cock-stand; the ivory mounts of his ankle bone: each washed and dried and warmed before the fire. Every inch stroked between thumb and forefinger until both of us were breathless; until both of us were hard.

I reached up again, this time fumbling for his trouser buttons - but again he stopped me.

“No need, oh, no need for that, my heart,” he gasped. “Only carry on with what you were doing and I’ll…ah, _yes_.”

After that, I never wrung anything but sighs, groans and the odd astoundingly filthy, whispered word out of him. He never bucked and thrust as he did when his prick was in my mouth, only lay like deep snow at midnight, shivering now and then, no hand on himself or on me, only his gothic labyrinth of a mind, twisting with perverse pleasures. 

Meantime I worshipped at his feet – at one perfect foot. Offerings of kisses I gave to it, of laving tongue and humming breath, of the tracery of fingertips and the buttressing of thumb-presses: at last setting the arch against my groin and rubbing myself against his passive heel shamelessly, opening my own trousers for ease and access.

Oh, God, if someone had come in then – we should have been clapped in irons on the spot.

“If only together…” as if the very thought only bound us tighter in our crime.

“Always,” said he and shuddered unmistakably just as I did too, spoiling my suit and soiling his white skin. Now, he would bathe, as he always did, afterwards, and I would bring him soap and towels like a bath boy on Jermyn Street and wash and dry and serve him today and all my days, from his head to his feet. 

Especially his feet.


End file.
